


Six Seconds

by Alsike



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Burnout - Freeform, F/F, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28604892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alsike/pseuds/Alsike
Summary: An interlude from my Lucy & Maggie were college roommates AU/headcanon:Lucy is not doing great and Maggie doesn't know how to help. Sometimes self-help books have really useful advice. And sometimes following that advice has unexpected consequences.
Relationships: Lucy Lane & Maggie Sawyer, Lucy Lane/Maggie Sawyer
Comments: 5
Kudos: 61





	Six Seconds

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt from Queersintherain, this is mostly me processing my burnout from last semester. All of the quotations are from the book _Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle_ , by Emily & Amelia Nagoski.
> 
> The stressors won't end (what a bullshit timeline we are stuck in), but fanfic's one way to release the stress!

Lucy hadn’t been okay for a while, and Maggie didn't know what to do anymore. Lucy was snappish and grumpy and sat in front of the TV more often than she used to, even though she was also always studying. Law school, apparently, was crap. One of her professors had it out for her, she'd gotten sick for a week early on in the semester and was still struggling to catch up. and her sister and her dad stopped talking to each other after a dramatic argument, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have reasons to be upset. But this wasn’t the normal kind of upset, and Maggie didn’t seem to be able to make it better.

She tried anyway. She tried everything she could think of. She didn’t have much time herself, but what she did with it was try to anticipate everything Lucy might need. She cooked dinner, kept things tidy, sat for hours she didn’t have to spare staring at the TV with Lucy because she didn’t want to leave her there alone.

“Why are you always  _ here!”  _ The words come out rough and ragged, and Maggie, who was just talking to talk, talking because Lucy had that look on her face that said she was sinking into the bad thoughts again, closed her mouth with a snap.

Lucy stared at her, her lips still parted from the words. There was still fury in her expression, but also horror at what she’d said. She didn’t want to have said it, but it was what she meant. It was too obvious that it was what she'd meant.

“If you need me to clear out, I can,” Maggie said, trying to stay calm and not let it hurt, even though it did hurt, it hurt worse than anything had since she’d last been told to get out by someone who she’d thought was family—her actual family.

“ _ No,” _ Lucy said. But then she didn’t say anything else. She looked away, her jaw going tight. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not— I’m not okay.”

“Is there anything I can do?” 

The curl of Lucy’s lip made it very clear that the offer wasn’t appreciated. “No. No there’s nothing. I just. . . I need a break.”

Maggie knew what that meant. It could have meant that she needed a break from school, family shit, etc, but that was the purposefully obtuse reading. Lucy needed a break from her. “Of course,” Maggie said and walked into her room and closed the door.

She made herself scarce for the next few days, but she didn’t really have to. Lucy spent the weekend in her room, from what Maggie could tell just lying there, on her bed, doing nothing.

Lucy came out when she was on her way to the library and Maggie pulled on her hat and gloves quicker. “Sorry,” she said. Apologizing for her own existence. “I’m going.”

“ _ Don’t _ .”

Maggie froze. Lucy was in ratty sweatpants and a hoodie. She still looked stiff and aching inside, not the confident, friendly, charmer that had been her roommate for all those years until now. “You’re going to the library, right? Can you get me . . . I don’t know, something on burnout? I don’t think I have the tools to stop feeling this way, and I just . . . I want to stop feeling this way.”

“Yeah, sure,” Maggie said, and gave Lucy an awkward nod instead of their usual hug goodbye. “Sure.”

There was a book on burnout, called  _ Burnout _ , on the not-quite-new books shelf. It had a ‘library recommends’ tag. Maggie grabbed it along with everything she needed for her paper. She didn’t stay to work on the paper though like she had been for the last few days, she went home.

Lucy had had a shower and cleaned herself up in the meantime. “If I act like I feel better, I’ll feel better, right?” she said, and there was a hint of the humor and wryness that Maggie loved about her friend. Not much, but a glimmer.

“Maybe? You interested in food?”

Lucy was, and Maggie cooked again while Lucy sat crosslegged on the sofa and read the book. She made noises too, and Maggie would pause rattling her pans to hear them. “Fuck,” was the most common thing she said. 

When the food was ready, Maggie brought the pasta over and sat near Lucy on the couch. Lucy told her about it as they ate. 

“Apparently I’m typical.” Lucy grimaced; she hated being typical. “Emotional exhaustion, no sense of accomplishment.” She shook her head. “I have just been so tired all semester, too tired to even focus when I look like I’m working. Even when I finish things I still feel the weight of them sitting on top of me. But what I hate the most is the depersonalization.”

“What’s that?” Maggie asked.

“Loss of empathy, caring and compassion.” Lucy looked away as if it was supposed to hit hard. 

Maggie didn’t want it to. “If I’ve been doing things wrong, it may not be that—“

“You haven’t been doing anything wrong!” Lucy snapped. “If anything you’re doing too much, and then I get mad at you for that. I get mad at you because I can’t feel anything besides mad right now, because I just feel—cut off from good emotions. I miss feeling good things when I see you.” Lucy looked like she might cry. “I miss feeling that, and I don’t know how to get those feelings back.”

“Well, what does the book say to do about it?”

Lucy used it to make a salute. “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

Things were a little better the next day. Lucy made brief eye-contact and smiled in the morning, and when Maggie got back from work that night, she was on the couch reading the book again. “How ya doing, short stuff?”

Lucy startled and didn’t glare like she usually did when Maggie teased her about her height. She looked sort of shocked instead, and a little worried. Maggie hesitated, but then went about her routine. She didn’t need to push. If Lucy wanted to talk, Lucy could take the first step.

Eventually, she did. Lucy had organized food—Maggie didn’t really call it  _ cooking _ , but her heart was in the right place—and Maggie was washing up when Lucy came in, leaning against the counter, the book on her hip. She was chewing on her lip and she looked at Maggie. She looked as tired as if she’d been in a fight, and she was wearing a pair of Maggie’s old ratty sweatpants and a Superman t-shirt Lois had given her while In A Mood.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Maggie said back.

“So, I was reading the book.”

“Mhmmm.” Maggie washed the last dish and racked it, then began to clean out the sink trap.

“I got to this one part and it . . . said something to me. It just felt right, and I wanted to know if you’d be willing to do it with me.”

“Sure.” Maggie put down the dishtowel, suddenly curious. She hadn’t really expected to strike it so hot with this one random book selection. But it made her feel good again, hopeful, to see Lucy reading it. It meant that Lucy was willing to do the work and make the effort, and things could be good again. She didn’t like to admit it, but she’d call Lucy . . . family, really, if the word didn’t make Maggie furious. She was the one person Maggie couldn’t lose. It felt like, in spite of everything, she’d been losing her in the last few weeks. It was a relief to know that Lucy didn’t want to be lost.

“Right,” said Lucy, all in a rush, and then grimaced in a very uncertain way. “Right.”

“So . . . what is it?”

“Right,” Lucy said for a third time. “Well . . .” She led the way back out into the living room and Maggie took a seat on the couch while Lucy paced circles around the coffee table. “So, the basic idea is that stress is kind of the worst thing ever. You know, it fucks up your body, screws up your short term memory, does all of this shit to your digestion and ruins your immune system, but the worst part is, even if you get rid of the things causing the stress, that doesn’t mean the stress goes away.”

Maggie bit her lower lip. “So like . . . not talking to your dad doesn’t mean you aren’t driving yourself nuts about what he’s thinking?”

Lucy hesitated. “Yeah,” she said. “Like not talking to  _ my _ dad does that.” She knew enough to know it didn’t really apply to Maggie’s family. Obviously Maggie's kind of stress in that area wouldn’t go away. Losing your family wasn’t ‘getting rid of stressors.’ “So, like, there are various ways of getting rid of the stress itself, and that’s sort of . . . getting to the end of it. Finishing it off. Coup-de-grace.” This came with an excitable gesture, and Maggie grinned internally. Not many people knew Lucy well enough to know that she was a Huge Nerd. “Some of the ways are like, be creative, go running, etcetera, etcetera, and I am  _ not _ creative, and you know my workout routine. I can’t add to it. I will literally die. But then it said one thing and it just . . . it made me think of you. It made me think of something I want with you. It says . . . do this to notice that you like this person, that you trust them and care about them. And I do feel that way about you, I just want to  _ notice _ it again.”

“So what do you have to do?”

Lucy grimaced, glanced down at the book, then up again. “Kiss you,” she said. “For six seconds.”

Maggie’s eyes went wide.

Sure, it wasn’t like they hadn’t made out a few times while drunk. Lucy was a grouchy drunk, and her grouchiness tended to take the form of, ‘you are such an annoying player with all your girlfriends, I am totally as good a kisser as you are, see I will prove it.’ Maggie wasn’t going to say no to a make out session with her hot roommate, but it was important that they were both drunk. Then it was just . . . drunk logic. It wasn’t like she was crushing on her arguably bisexual-heteroromantic roommate. It wasn’t like she  _ loved _ her or anything.

But they were not drunk.

“I—“ Maggie pushed down her resistance. If Lucy needed it, she’d risk it. Six seconds wasn’t all that long. “Okay.” She put on her best shit-eating grin. “Not gonna turn that down—especially if it means you won’t hate me so much after.”

Lucy sagged slightly as if she wanted to protest— _ I don’t hate you, I just hate everything and myself and you’re part of everything, it’s not you  _ specifically _ — _ but she didn’t. Instead she arranged herself on the couch by Maggie. There was a bit of shuffling, of trying to find a good angle that wasn’t in each other’s laps, there was no good angle that wasn’t in each other’s laps. Finally, they both ended up sideways on the couch, legs crossed, and leaning forward.

“Count of six,” Lucy said, looking fierce and a little intense. Maggie nodded. And then Lucy rocked forward, rising up a little, and Maggie leaned in to meet her.

Maggie had never been quite so aware of how weird lips were and the presence of teeth, and also, unfortunately, of how nice Lucy smelled; she always smelled nice, except when she was just back from working out. Lucy had her eyes shut, so Maggie quickly shut hers too; staring at someone while they were kissing you was weird and uncomfortable. She was counting in her head— _ one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand _ , and it felt endless, she was going to be kissing Lucy for _ ever _ . This was going to be the most awkward, most unpleasant—

Lucy made a small noise. It was a release of breath mostly, and it came with a softening, a brief release and remerging without ever losing contact, and Maggie, as if it was automatic, relaxed too. She forgot about kissing, which made it all a lot easier. She knew how to do the kissing, overthinking it was the problem. Instead she only thought about Lucy, about being so close to Lucy, about how she never really had enough of Lucy, of the way she moved, the shape of her arms, watching the nape of her neck as she shifted sweat-damp hair off of it. She loved Lucy’s smug grins, and the way she fought for her, fought anyone, would fight Maggie’s own demons if she had to. She felt  _ safe _ with Lucy. She hadn’t really felt safe with anyone for a long time. Lucy’s lips parted, just a little, and a sharp sweet tug of want caught in Maggie’s belly like a fishhook. This didn’t feel like it was part of the prescription for fixing burnout, but Lucy was the one who'd started it—a flicker of tongues, a wet slide, and Maggie’s chest was suddenly tight, her breathing ragged, a hard ice-hot knot in her core—thank you autonomic nervous system, fuck you too. Then another brief seal of lips on lips.  _ Six-one-thousand _ , and Lucy broke the kiss.

She sat back, flushed and a little shaky—and fuck, Maggie felt that too—but there was something different about her body language, more open, soft. The tension had fled her shoulders. Then she peeked up, grinning on one side, and shook her head. “So that— I did not expect that to work so well.”

Maggie pulled her knees to her chest but she was grinning too, stupidly; it was especially stupid being that she was still turned on from the kiss. If Lucy was going to kiss her like that on the reg, she thought she might die from it. She had been fine with her low-key crush on her roommate, but another three of those and she was going to fucking propose, she knew it. Only she was too relaxed and pleased and calm to feel very upset about that. “Did it?”

“Yeah,” Lucy said, pushing her hair out of her face and looking up through her lashes in a way that Maggie very pleasantly hated her for. “Turns out, I still love you. It was nice to notice that again.”

“Love you too, jerk.”

Eventually, Maggie regained feeling in her feet. Eventually they stopped casting each other shy glances.

“So, um, what did the section say, exactly.”

Lucy nodded and opened the book back up again. “Every day,” she read, and Maggie predicted her own spontaneous combustion, “kiss your partner for six seconds. … Six seconds is too long to kiss someone you resent or dislike, and it’s far too long to kiss someone with whom you feel unsafe. Kissing for six seconds requires you stop and deliberately notice that you like this person, that you trust them, and that you feel affection for them.”

Ah, yeah. It did, didn’t it.

Then Lucy froze. “Oh shit.”

“What?” Maggie asked.

“I didn’t read the next section. Apparently you can also do it with hugging.”

The word choice in the section Lucy had read finally twigged for Maggie. “Your  _ partner _ ,” she said. “You were supposed to do that with like your husband, not your  _ roommate.” _

Lucy grinned guiltily. “Maybe next time we should try the hugging?” 

Maggie was both disappointed and relieved. “Sure, dipshit. I thought you were a lawyer. You didn’t even read to the end of the section?”

“I have now! It prescribes twenty-second hugs. I demand some, starting tomorrow.”

Suddenly, Maggie was very worried that having Lucy’s body pressed tightly against hers for twenty full seconds was going to be just as terrible as a six-second kiss had been.

She couldn’t wait to find out.


End file.
